


i don't really blame you for being dead but you can't have your sweater back

by goodbyechunkylemonmilk



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Canonical Character Death, Lie Low At Lupin's, M/M, Post-Goblet of Fire, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-28
Updated: 2017-04-28
Packaged: 2018-10-24 21:11:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,665
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10749909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goodbyechunkylemonmilk/pseuds/goodbyechunkylemonmilk
Summary: Sirius goes to Grimmauld first, knows better but does it anyway, just barely has enough restraint not to apparate straight in. There will be wards, which he could once have broken, but not now, with a wand the opposite of his own and a mind half what it used to be. He  watches all night and through the day. No one comes in or out, and he shouldn't be surprised, but it leaves him feeling unsteady anyway. He has no family, chosen or forced, left.





	i don't really blame you for being dead but you can't have your sweater back

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fic I started years ago and always thought I would finish, but that's really not going to happen! It's a little disjointed with no real payoff but I like it enough that I want to post it as is. **Heed the tags, for real! This gets bizarrely dark in places but I was feeling myself when I wrote it I guess.**
> 
> And I know, I know, Richard Siken titles are played out, but this fic is at least four years old so I think it's appropriate.

Sirius hasn't had, now he thinks on it, a proper conversation since before he was arrested. It was easy, in the cave, to pretend James was there with him, to explain and apologize, sometimes to act as if none of it had happened and they were back in school or just out of it, before James' mother was dead and his father dying, before he stepped up his charade with Lily because it had been their desire to see him happily married. It was easy to pretend, but that was his James, and sometimes he even let himself off the hook, imagined James' voice soft and upbeat, saying it was okay, really. So even though this is Remus, whom he was once used to pushing around, he stops near the door to catch his breath. He can feel his heart wherever skin brushes skin, as if his entire body is pulsating. This is still new to him, this feeling. This is new to him, feeling, like rediscovering something lost that no longer quite fits. He felt a lot in Azkaban, certainly, but much of it the same, and deadened in a way that made him jealous of those he'd lost who, he figured, got to feel that way all the time.

When Sirius knocks, Remus answers almost immediately, apparently without checking, because he freezes in the doorway. Bad instincts. “Dumbledore sent me, I'm to 'lie low.' I don't suppose he thinks much of my common sense, does he?” He regrets this almost immediately. In school, when Remus managed to pull himself together enough to scold him, he was young and brash and able to ignore it, or to have James tell him to shove off. Now he is bruised, and this opening, if taken, will jab him in the tender, unfaded spot directly above his heart. So he continues, “I'm taking your bedroom.” This is something Remus would agree to without argument or resentment if Sirius asked, explained (he's been in Azkaban, then a cave; the first night at James', they fell asleep on the couch, and if this mixes with that in his mind, it will ruin one of the very few good things he has left). Remus would agree if Sirius explained, so he doesn't, just shoves the rest of the way inside and looks around. He can see the whole room while staring straight ahead, eyes unmoving. Outstretched arms could likely span it, a suspicion he confirms, ignoring the grimace on Remus' face, and almost laughs when his fingertips just brush the rough paint on either side of him. He misses laughing without laughing at someone. Or he misses laughing with someone. There's something missing, anyway.  
  
Remus has one mostly full bottle of firewhiskey stowed in the back of his icebox, which Sirius finds his very first morning of trying to figure out what he melodramatically thinks of as a new prison. He and Remus aren't quite drinking together, but the place is small enough that it feels that way; the bedroom door creaks open almost as soon as he lies down and he can't be bothered to close it, so he puts the bottle to his lips just as Remus turns to look from the kitchen. Sirius used to have illusions about himself, about who and what he was, but James is gone now, James who told him he was something more than the boy who almost killed two classmates, the boy who was a little too much like his parents. Remus said he _could_ be better, with the emphasis on that word, the accusatory subjunctive. There's something ugly inside him, something that stopped Azkaban from destroying him because he was already mad, so he will not allow himself to be embarrassed about drinking before noon.

When they were young, they drank what James stole from his parents' liquor cabinet. (Though "stole" was an overstatement; he could never decide whether to brag that he was sneaky or that he had parents who gave him everything he wanted.) Remus' is cheap, but Sirius is not pampered, wasn't really then and certainly isn't now, so he takes a drink without letting his face change.

“I thought I'd be dead by now. Twenty-four, twenty-seven at the latest. I saw Regulus coming.” Sirius does his best to say this like it's nothing, and he must at least partially succeed because Remus' mouth turns down at the corners. “He was never very good at keeping himself alive. He'd forget to eat, lie in bed for days. I remember, at school he'd always do these trick moves, Wronski Feint and everything, and no one got it, because he was so quiet off the pitch, had nails bitten so short he bled on half the essays he turned in. What no one understood was that he didn't _care_. He wasn't being daring because he didn't think he was risking anything. James though, I expected to make it. It used to get to me, that he'd still be alive without me, having this whole life I wouldn't be a part of. Careful what you wish for, I suppose.”

“Oh,” Remus says, so quietly it's more an insensible grunt than actual speech, and then nothing. Sirius waits until his vision has gone a bit off, when his words are not slurred but spoken with the careful determination that comes from knowing they easily could be. He holds the bottle close to his face so he won't have to look at anything else, begins to scratch off the label but stops when he catches sight of his nails, long and yellowed.

“How could you think,” he begins, then pauses to take a drink, and another since the bottle is so close already to empty. “How could you think I would kill James? On purpose?” There is no longer anything or anyone forcing him to remember that he is guilty, that he did this, but he recalls well enough on his own. Of all the things bothering him, this ought to be low on the list. He has never much cared about people's opinions, but he cannot imagine, cannot see how it is possible to have known James and to have known him and to then believe him guilty.

“I told myself you had cracked. From torture, maybe. You didn't see yourself when they took you away; you were unhinged.”

And there is a lot to say to that, honestly: that he remembers well enough, that he can still feel it bubbling up inside him, that part of him sat back and watched and he knew he needed to stop but couldn't bring himself to. But it's not worth it, not worth talking about, so he says, “Mad or not, I would never betray James, not at all and certainly not to the same people who took my brother from me.” His hand tightens on the bottle, and he wonders if it will break, clenches a little harder. “I would have given my life for him. I was prepared to, I wanted to--”

“I know that now.”

“You should have known it then!” The bottle doesn't break in his hand, and he doesn't throw it either, just blinks and it is in pieces on the floor, a surprising amount of alcohol seeping into the carpet. He stares, then forces himself to relax, to let his fingers uncurl. He shrugs. “It was cheap anyway, like everything here.” He puts his foot down without thinking, maybe.

His mother called him ungrateful. That was one of her favorites: she would scream that he didn't appreciate anything she or his father had done for him, the advantages they'd given him. This is what he thinks about as he watches Remus pick shards of glass out of his foot. Ungrateful. Ingrate. He doesn't think he ought to have to be grateful for things he didn't ask for, like his parents' money or the probing of Remus' wand. He started to examine his foot, but instead of pulling anything out he twisted the shards, pushed them farther in until his fingers were too slick to get a good grip, so detached that he was surprised when Remus squawked and slapped his hands away. Remus acted like it was an accident because that was easier, and Sirius let him.

“All done,” Remus says, and Sirius says nothing in return. His eyes, always large and deep-set, are sunken into his skull now, the whites standing out against his waxy skin. He can feel that his stare is disorienting, in Remus' response and in the foreign way it sits on his face. Finally, he nods, and Remus realizes it's all he has to offer.

Ingrate.

 

 

 

 

  
He thinks about ways to do it always, fights the urge to drown himself in the soapy dishwater, watches Remus operate his muggle oven and considers sticking his head inside, to die ignominiously with last night's dinner, or tonight's. He could use Remus come the full moon, make his way into the reinforced shed by agreeing to transform and then change back, but even that, a plot to escape, makes him feel sick. ( _A stag,_ he'd said when James was the first of them to transform. _Well, that's just embarrassing. You're_ _**prey**_.)

 

 

 

 

  
He always dumps his dishes in the sink after he uses them, remaining food left to crust over. He is very careful not to allow this to become something neat and domestic—he washed the dishes with James, the one spell he never quite managed so he did them by hand after they'd piled right up to the tap, or he took them to the alley behind their flat and threw them against the wall as stress relief. And James complained but wouldn't wash them either, came out and watched and rolled his eyes when Sirius finished with cuts on his hands, didn't offer to heal them but did it anyway, like it went without saying that they would take care of each other.


End file.
